Chungju Dam - Chungju, South Korea

Creative cleaning project on the Chungju Dam in South Korea

In October 2012, an international art project showed a wide audience just how creative working with Kärcher's high-pressure cleaners can be: together with a German-Korean team of Kärcher employees, industrial climbers and surveyors, artist Klaus Dauven created the "Horang-ee" (Tiger) artwork at the Chungju Dam.

The Chungju Dam, situated approximately 100 kilometres south of Seoul, is the largest in South Korea. Holding over 2.7 billion cubic metres of water, the dam has supplied the capital city and region with drinking water since 1985. The site also produces energy and protects against flooding.

And now the dam has acquired another role as a gigantic canvas. The "Horang-ee" masterpiece depicts a tiger, which was drawn in the dirt on the 447-metre long and 98-metre high dam using Kärcher high-pressure cleaners. In order to transfer the artist's design from a DIN A3 landscape format to the dam wall, it was digitised and projected onto the wall using laser technology. A total of over 1,300 measurement points were calculated. These were marked on the dam wall with yellow modelling clay and then connected by Klaus Dauven. The contours of the drawing were therefore created using the principle of "painting by numbers".

The many fixtures on the wall presented a challenge as they provided an irregular surface to work on. As different parts of the wall had different levels of dirt, the artwork had to be positioned very precisely. In order to reach all of the different parts, the artist and the industrial climbers helping him abseiled down from the crest of the wall. It was mostly organic dirt such as algae, lichens and moss that needed to be removed from the dam – a job that could be carried out without the use of chemicals.